It was *the* perfect game - you need exactly that: Perfect luck, and patience without end. And I used the save-reload cheat, of course.

I started with three life, one nature, one sorc, and one chaos as spellbooks, and myrran, alchemy and node-mastery as skills.Settings were all on highest (impossible difficulty, great landmass, strong nodes).

I had, of course, draconians, because no AI can beat a fleet of adamant draconian warships (except for a fleet of sky-drakes, but later to that). I'll call them B52s from now on.The B52s are overpowered, and too cheap to get - I recommend doing something about them in MoM IME later on ...

My enemies were all life-magic using, had a good mix of the elementary schools, and were distributed evenly over the map, Ssra and Ariel having a big continent on their own, and Horus and Jafar sharing a big continent, all having enough and equal space to develop, building lot of cities.

By chance I found Aura of Majesty early on, distributed it to all others, and with good luck maintained to be at peace for most of the time with all wizards (and often even they keeping peace among each others), and thus being able to exchange spells over long periods of time. I plane-sealed early on, and thereby successfully kept ssra from exchangin spells with the other wizards, thereby keeping an advantage by being his only access to spells...

Just before I ran out of spells to learn (before spell of mastery), I conquered a nature node on myrror with my B52s, gaining two nature books, especially gaining access to Gaias blessing, regeneration and nature awareness. I also had change terrain and transmute.

Shortly thereafter I gained *gasp* warlord in another green node, and then conquered a red node with two chaos books with help of buffed heroes. That gave me raise vulcanoe.

At that time, I had already conquered dwarven cities (I made many of them, for the big money), a single dark-elven city (to build warlocks - not necessary, but fun), and some troll-cities (for the priceless troll shamans - ultimate, undestructible decoys, which kept the AI from killing more important troops). I relocated many cities (risking and suffering loss of fame), to gain maximum cities (in numbers, as in max. population) in my sphere of influence, not settling on any continent that belonged to other wizards, to keep peace. I only had three draconian cities on a small island on arcanum.I also had removed each and every ruin and freed every node on their land with my fast-moving draconian warships, or even faster flying heroes. I let the nodes on their territory to them, so they could use the power for themselves.

By "theft", I also conquered a city of high humans, that has left ariel by a random event at end of turn, and completely removed it from her map, so not to anger her. This gave me adamant paladins later on, as I had kept one place for them free. This eventually gave me me the necessary troops - eight adamantium paladins, buffed with flight, to conquer the final blue node, and to get the bitterly needed two sorc-books.

Then came another life-book, with access to stream of life, and arch-magic.

I patiently and continuously built up my cities with gaias blessing (on each and every), terraformed with transmute, change terrain, and raise vulcanoe (esp. on tundra), and occasionally cast stream of life, for either - temporarily - small cities, to speed up growth, and - permanently - on dwarves, trolls and the dark-elves, to keep unrest low, and raise the taxes.

While learning all spells, I also patiently improved the cities of the other wizards with raise vulcanoe and change terrain, to maximize the potential size of their cities as well, concentrating on either very small, or big, but stunted cities (that is, at their limit of growth, but below the maximum of 25).

When I started learning the spell of mastery, I had already enough troops and power to run them into the ground completely within a few rounds, my score was double of theirs together, and no attempt to keep peace was possible any more, and they started throwing the big, ugly spells at me (as otherwise, I was mainly out of reach for their troops, and with my draconian warships, every attempt to invade me was futile - thus I was able to keep most of my cities free of troops, only protecting nodes, and crucial waypoints, in case of unrest or the only few wandering monsters left). Every node and ruin was conquered, no more cities could be built (hardcoded maximum of 100 - the map could have supported way over 120, I researched).

Now started the boring phase of high-scoring. I did it once, will not do it ever again, and I'm sure you will do it once at best as well.

I exchanged every hero for another that had the "fame"-attribute, as that improved the score.

I cast crusade (helping the score, as it leveled up my fame-buffed heroes!), doom mastery, nature awareness, and some other spell-blocking things.

Then I conquered the cities with the wizard-towers (and ONLY those!) of my enemies in turn, to maximize fame-output, while they kept giving me two spells on victory. After some rounds (they used the spell of return), I had to wait, so they could still learn some spells, before I crushed them again. In this stagnant phases, I killed every army greater than three outside of cities (being able to locate them with via nature awareness). For all this, I only used heroes, to level them up, which raised my score even further. On every conquered city, I cast gaias blessing and, very often, stream of life, to maximize population.With two B52s and one troll shaman, I was able to protect every city well enough.Before conquering the wizard towers for the first time, I had to kill all of their summoned creatures with fake attacks, as otherwise they would not have been able to return (a flaw in the game). Thereafter, I never allowed them to summon powerful creatures any more.

My fame from victory piled up, fame from my heroes via "Fame"-attribute piled up, my number of spells piled up, the population and number of my cities grew quicly, until only one city was left for one wizard to return from banishment. The score from "time" was neglectible, of course, but fame evened it out. It took me too much patience, and nearly cost me my appetite on Master of Magic at all, to wait for their return, before attacking them again.

Then I casted the spell of Mastery, and *poof* there were 12069 points. With more patience it could have been more via fame from won battles, but well, at that time I though: What for? The last third of the game was booooring, as I only delayed victory in exchange for a high-score.

I'm sure I understand MoM well enough now, to have some lust for "repairs", especially on the weak defense of wizard towers, and also on some "game-design-bugs" of the game itself.

And I would change the "impossible"-level by giving the enemies much more skills (like warlord and alchemy for every enemy wizard, or similar things), as, truly, they are no match at all. I'd also set for "Impossible", that you cannot cast the spell of Mastery, if you ever banished an enemy-wizard.

And that's why I would like to see MoM IME in action with other players, as that would change the aspect of weak AI...

My advice: Don't go for the high-score, but instead, make the game more interesting for you, by self-imposing limits (as not attacking the weakly defended cities with the enemies wizard-towers except if in need of dispelling Great Waste of Meteor storm and such), NOT save-reloading, and choosing "impossible" combinations of races, skills and books.